Get on a Losing Streak

Learn more about your Body, Mind and Spirit with Viva Vitality brought to you GBG Vitality.

If going on a diet to stay healthy and maintain your youth were easy, then everybody would’ve been in their ideal weight by now.

People wouldn’t know about obesity because this is something that can be avoided with no problems. Well, aside from eating smaller meals and maintaining balance with the amount of proteins and carbohydrates you take in, there are more things you can do. All you need here is a whole lot of discipline and a ton of willpower.

The hard part is when you crave for the ice cream and potato chips, and you feel that there’s not much you can do about it. Get through this by further cutting down your meals to smaller but more frequent ones. It gets harder for women who are going through PMS. The best way to deal with this is to give your mind time to digest what’s in your tummy. When you chew slowly and avoid binging, you may realize that you’re actually satisfied. You don’t leave the table feeling as if you’re a glutton and that you ate more than what you can take.

Diets can really become frustrating, and sometimes, it gets even more so when your scale hasn’t budged despite your best efforts.

Instead of counting numbers, try wearing old clothes that were once tight for you. After about six weeks of steady exercise, you’ll notice that you have more muscle and less fat, which means that pants won’t feel as tight as before. A pound of muscle will look smaller and will take up less space in the body than a pound of fat. More muscle is a good thing, even though it can temporarily stall the needle of your scale. Muscle tissue weighs more than fat tissue because it’s 70 percent water, while fat is only 20 percent water.

But even though your weight might not be dropping, you’re still making progress because your new muscle is helping you burn even more fat. Muscle tissues, after all, use more calories than fat cells do to stay alive. So, the more muscle you possess, the more calories you burn even when you’re not working out. To curb the frustration you feel at this point in your diet, look for other ways to measure. Do your clothes feel more comfortable? Do you look and feel better? All those count for as much as, if not more than, what the scale says.

Then you’ll see yourself steadily lose weight.

Don’t stop at this point. If you get tired, skip gym for a week, and no more than that. And take heart in the fact that you’re not alone. Too much time at the gym can make your body too efficient because it figures out how to do the same moves burning fewer calories. Taking time off may be just what your body needs to jolt it back into gear. When you head back, try a different routine.

The change will jump-start your system and prep it for the next round of weight loss.

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Learn more about your Body, Mind and Spirit with Viva Vitality brought to you GBG Vitality.